Blog Comments & Posts

Monopoly means exclusive control, not "lots of control" or "more than the others." Maybe you are talking about something other than monopoly.

By admitting that there is competition, you admit that people have a choice.

Anyway, even if Google did achieve a monopoly, the threat of competition would always loom and provide a check on their power. Unless of course it was a government monopoly which prevented others from legally competing with them.

Google is successful in search insofar as they provide the best search result. I doubt that their first move after attaining a monopoly would be to degrade the quality or reputation of their search results. That would be a nice invitation for competitors.

Just because they're the biggest now, doesn't mean they will always be.

A monopoly is 100% of market share and I very much doubt that Google will achieve that.

That being said, companies get to that level of market share (or close to it) by providing a lot of value for their customers. So growing market share means they're doing a lot of good.

If they get to a point where they decide they want to stop doing good and start doing all those nasty things that you mentioned Rand, then their market share will drop because people will go elsewhere. Maybe not overnight, but eventually.

The "check's in the mail" clients that are always 2 months behind on their invoice but call you every day to ask you what you've done for them lately.

The "stone age CMS" clients. Want to edit title tags, METAs, H1s? Forget about it, the CMS doesn't allow for that. Want to change the HTACCESS file? Has to be billed out by the hosting company at $200 an hour. Want to change a few words on a page? Has to go through three levels of approval. But don't worry, there's a new CMS coming with the 2011 redesign.

The "flash rules my world!" client that is in love with their awesome looking flash interface. Impossible to navigate and impossible to optimize, the site is beautiful...if you have a T3 line in your office that can load it in under a minute.

The "friend who just needs you to look at his site real quick" client. Not really a client but he'll want to take up hours of your time getting free SEO advice from him (solution: tell him you're busy and send him a link to SEOmoz).

Good clients:

The "one sale per year pays for your entire retainer" client. The golden goose. Get them a few leads that convert and they'll love you forever.

The "I don't know what SEO is but we better keep paying that guy" clients. Your mystical SEO powers have brought traffic and leads to their site. Now, 5 years later, they think that if they stop sending you checks their rankings will crash. Special bonus: they never call or email you.

I agree completely with your emphasis on trust. So many clients come to me with horror stories from other "SEOs" and one only has to look around at the web design companies that offer "SEO" consisting of search engine submission.

Once you do good work for people and you can get some referrals, the business practically grows on its own. And you should be getting prospects through your own site, right?

I always say "well, you found me, so I must be doing something right."

Then I give them the names and phone numbers of some happy clients and say "feel free to talk to one of my current clients." Most of the time they don't call, but just being open about it builds a lot of trust.

I never saw the point of being popular with other SEOs. I mean, it's good to have friends, but other SEOs are never going to hire you, although I do get some referral business from local people when they're swamped and I have some free bandwith.

There are so so many potential clients out there! Why blog when you can be making some sweet moolah!?

I have a client who knows enough SEO to get me into trouble. A little knowledge is far more dangerous than none at all.

In my experience, I like running across these people. They know enough about SEO to realize that it's important for their business. Much easier to sell them than somebody who doesn't have the first clue about what SEO is.

As a bonus, you look extra good when you undo all of their bad ideas or get them reindexed.

I think that actionable/useful content is what separates a good blog from a medicore blog.

So many people start blogs (and I'm guilty here too) that have a tagline like "random musings..." or "my rants on..." and I just think wow, this is going to be bad because you're not going to provide anything of value to me.

As a counterpoint, there are tons of political blogs that don't give any actionable advice--they just report and comment on political news.

So while I agree with you for the most part, I think that people also gain utility just from reading someone else that agrees with them and feeling that they are part of something.

I thought college kids could find anything for free on the internet? I think the parents are the ones that've never heard of OpenOffice and go buying the Microsoft suite for their kids when they ship off to school.

I said it depends... I don't want SEOmoz to be a place for "breaking news" and headlines, but I really do enjoy the more in-depth news-type articles that you occasionally post, like the RipOff Report summary.

I think of those pieces like the longer investigative news series that newspapers sometimes run.

That being said, when something huge like the Microsoft/Yahoo story comes around, I would like to hear the moz reaction and specifically what does it mean for me as an SEO professional.

Does anyone have any data on how often Facebook users click on ads? It seems like everyone is saying that they don't click on the ads, but in my experience, I've clicked on a lot of ads in Facebook (I know, the plural of anecdote is not data).

Also, as a Facebook advertiser, I get CTRs of .05% to .25%. That's not great, but it seems to be comparable to a contextually-targeted campaign with AdWords (although I don't have much experience with those campaigns so admittedly my numbers might be really low).

It seems to me like you're saying "don't guarantee a certain ranking" but at the same time "don't go out of your way to 'not guarantee' something," and I agree with both.

If I was the client I would probably be suspicious if I saw a ton of language about how much you weren't going to do. On the flip side, anything you guarantee, you better deliver (or be prepared to not get paid or end up in court).

I do like Compete's Search Analytics tool but I still feel like we're in the dark ages of web traffic analytics. There's just nothing out there that's really reliable, even in relative terms, as Rand's example demonstrates.

Your analysis is apt, up to a point. I agree 100% that the linkerati overestimated the actual offline support of Ron Paul.

But to compare him to Snakes on a Plane is misleading. There's a big difference between something that goes viral for it's comedic/ironic value and something that goes viral because it has a very passionate evangelizing userbase or fan club.

Would you look at Apple and say, now there's a company that's got a lot of online support, rabid fans, etc., but they're totall failing offline because they only have 8% market share for computers?

There was a lot to Ron Paul that people liked, and that they weren't hearing from anyone else--mainly his antiwar stance. Howard Dean's popularity stemmed mostly from a rabid dislike of George Bush, but Ron Paul stands for something very specific--limited government and non-interventionist foreign policy.

People were chattering about Snakes on a Plane because LOL it's Samuel Jackson and isn't this going to be ridiculous!

People supported Ron Paul because they really agreed with him or at least a good portion of what he was saying. That's why he had tens of thousands in MeetUp groups and people standing on street corners. That's how he raised $20 million. Unfortunately for him, his support was very deep, but not very broad.

I do not agree with how NS went about it, but I definately agree that thay needed to do something, and beleive that they were indeed looking out for customers (first and foremost)

Are you saying that NS had to go out and register domains that their customers were searching for, and then mark them up? I don't see how that's looking out for their customers, but I could be misinterpreting you.

This is capitalism at its best! Thousands of new sites popping up, the crap ones get flushed out by the market, while the best--the ones that provide real value--rise to the top and stick around until something better comes along.

I don't care if there's a thousand junk sites out there as long as I get a few that make my life better.

"hey, we're really awesome at programming, let's build a web x.0 company and get rich" when it should be more like this: "hey we found a way to create value and make people's lives a lot better, let's find some really smart programmers to implement it."

At the risk of sounding cynical, I'm going to agree with Richard and say that these blog awards are more about getting links and buzz than an honest attempt at determining which SEO blogs are really the best.

Not that there's anythign wrong with that; we should just recognize it for what it is.

But now I'm interested in the SEOmoz survey..what kind of data are we going to get? I would much rather have a really infomative and well-executed survey that serves as a valuable resource, than a silly blog popularity contest.

All we need is one disgruntled politician who can't find his name atop the SERPs to start some "fair internet marketing" bill. The less politicians know about SEO, the safer I feel about my livelihood.

Another reason to keep your linking clean is that it will make it much easier in the future to change the language you use. I often come across sites where all the pages are html and I want to modernize them to PHP to make use of simple things like include files.

If the linking is clean then you won't have a problem, but it's a real pain to switch hundreds of links from .html to .php.

It depends on how well you like to sleep at night. If you're doing black hat SEO, and you're up all night worrying that today might be the day your site gets found by Google and shut down, then your quality of life might suffer.

It also depends on what your career goals are--do you want to just get your sites to rank or do you want others to hire you? Do you hope to work for an agency, or start your own company some day?

Are you looking to develop an expertise and teach SEO or speak at conferences?

How you answer those questions will influence your path. But I see no problem with experimenting with both black and white hat. I'm guessing that most self-proclaimed white hats cross over into the gray area every once in a while.

Also, it sounds like you're thinking of giving up white hat because it's not working out for you. I would say that it was worked very well for others, so before you discard white hat seo, you may want to examine your strategy and how well you're executing it.

I have visions of men in white lab coats, taking notes as the search monkeys bang on the keyboard... "The male is a particularly aggressive searcher, often entering up to 5 keywords at a time to snare his result."

I'm talking about the flyer ads, both old and new. I realize they don't fall under the umbrella of the "new Social ads" but they've remained effective for me even after the changes.

I think that the social ads do have a great deal of potential, especially for branding purposes and traditional advertising. It's really too early to make big judgements though as the system is fairly new and most brands don't even have pages for themselves yet.

Few users seem to even know about "Facebook Pages" and even fewer have actually become fans of a page. So it's a little early to tell.

I can't speak for Nick, but in my experience, the Facebook Ads I've run have done very well. We're targeting users who have identified themselves as "in College."

To me, the great strength of Facebook ads is that they allow you to segment the user population. Unfortunately, at the present moment, this segmenting is very limited, and often you end up having to target EVERYONE instead of the narrow subsection you want.

That being said, clicks can be had for cheap (under 50 cents) and you can include pictures. Despite the limitations, we've had good conversion success (not that Facebook allows you to track this like Adwords does!).

I think there is something inherently trustworthy about the Facebook neighborhood that makes (otherwise ad-blind) users more accepting of advertising on Facebook.

This is really great information! I just started pitching SEO services and I've been doing this informally for prospective clients but it's nice to have a more formal message for cold clients (not that I would copy this verbatim!!).